SHORT RIGA

As an individual department within this year’s festival the team behind the wittily titled SHORT RIGA have devised a remarkable feat – altogether three competitions of new shorts from around the world, Baltic student films and a separate category for music videos. Showcased within three respective programmes SHORT RIGA will take over the newly established small theater KINO BIZE as well as organise workshops and host an award ceremony.

Five young sisters are running on a country path, their hair waving in the air like mane. But this summer everything will change in an instant: after the sisters have begun an innocent game with their classmates, their conservative grandmother and uncle decide to marry them off, with or without their consent.

The films of Nanni Moretti, who could be Woody Allen’s Italian cousin, are tragicomedies of the everyday – they bring together humour, vulnerability, and a deep understanding of a human life, with all its joys and sorrows.

Ieva Ozoliņa’s debut is a personal thriller. During 1990s, her father, a president of a bank going bankrupt, goes missing. The father has been on Interpol’s list of wanted men for the last sixteen years, until one day news arrive that a man fitting the profile has been admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Kuala Lumpur.

A revolution changes the social and political landscape; but first it transforms the actual one. No other European capital city centre had recently looked the way Kiev’s Maidan did a short while ago, resembling a medieval carnival or a futuristic fantasy.

In Stella’s eyes, her elder sister Katya is a true star: she is the apple of their parents’ eye and a talented figure skater who spends her days practising the sport. When Katya’s dedication begins to resemble an obsession while she herself becomes emotionally distant, Stella is the first to find out her sister’s secret and realize its potentially dire consequences.

What can Matilda do when it’s summer, but it’s raining, and she has to stay indoors? If it were winter, instead of the rain there would be lovely snow. Matilda’s dream of winter holidays can be brought to life by her little friends. Where do they live? In the freezer, of course! The film programme is made possible thanks to the support of EEA Grants un Ministry of Culture Republic of Latvia.